Reviews with content warning for Antisemitism - Ninth House

Reviews tagging 'Antisemitism'

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

46 reviews

ashlynbaer's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Genuinely could not put this book down. I read it nonstop for 7 hours. Can’t wait to get my hands on the sequel.

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sealreads's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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unburnt_bela's review against another edition

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The racism against POC people in this book it's astonishing—despite whatever good intentions could lay behind the plot.
Dark academia it's more than a setting, it's a critic toward elitism inside intellectual and cultural settings.
This book isn't a critic. To me, it's a fantasy story about a Yale graduated where "what if Yale's secret societies had dark magical powers, with very edgy characters as protagonists?"
And this is a problem that I've seen multiple times with fairly successful YA authhors: to have an adult book does NOT mean "watch how many trigger warnings I can sum up into this bad boy." (Trigger warnings that originally published weren't included in the ARCS giveaways).
The multiple heavy-topic themes are just thrown in for shock value, without any care to dive deeper in the consequences that would give respect to actual victims.
Needless to say, to read this as a Latina was so deeply hurtful I had a panic attack that made me stop reading with care and just spiteful sweeping across pages to read the ending.
Alex could've just been Jewish, coming from poverty, and NOTHING would've changed in the plot. For her to be ambiguously Latina it's just to justify the bad traits she has, and oh boy she has a LOT.

Bad at school
Enters Yale as a replacement, because she could have never entered by her own merits.
Too dumb to learn Latin.
Refer herself as "shit that sticks".
Drug addict.
And the root? All because her (Latino) father abandoned her.

Please. Spit in my face closer, Bardugo.
All the themes in this book just make up space of nonsense.

Because how it is possible that a book criticizing misogyny

has the big baddie as a WOMAN???

or that the obvious main love interest it's your stereotypical gloomy, rich, white boy? That discovers his attraction toward Alex

through a rape scene???

That includes a revenge scene reminding of "Spit in my grave" where Alex

makes the rapist eat his own excrement while she records a video JUST to show it to her raped friend and that just magically cures any of her traumas??

This is wild, man.
Plot-related aside, this book it's boring up the last third.
Bardugo it's an established author and it's shows: because to waste half the book in narrating things that already happened and that the readers are already aware of? Unbelievable.
Here the murder it's a setting to info-dump about the characters. A rather annoying strategy I've seen Bardugo has started to settle comfortably in since King of Scars after the success of Six of Crows.
The problem? I don't care for any of the characters in Ninth House. They're not charming, or witty, or funny. I don't care about their tragic backstories (TM).
Her writing it's very good, but here it feels snobby and over the top. One thing it's to weave the atmosphere and another it's to show off.
Anyway, with this book I end my decade-long relationship of devotion toward Leigh Bardugo's work. Once brilliant and refreshing, now coming crashing down since it's peak with Six of Crows, landing messily with the King of Scars fiasco, and buried into Dante's Inferno with Ninth House.
0.5 stars ⭐️, for "trying".

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hjb_128's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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emsavors's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

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j_the_human's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

HOLY SHIT THIS BOOK Y’ALL.

Obviously this is Leigh Bardugo so I knew it was going to cook but I did not expect exactly HOW MUCH.

Pros:
- dark. Really dark. This is the dark in dark academia I’ve been looking for.
- secret societies! Horrible unethical rituals!! A very traumatized girl not really given a choice but to get in the middle of it!!
- complex, imperfect characters who you root for anyways because goddamn do they just deserve something good for once
- REVENGE
- 0 shying away from hard topics. Bardugo did not come to play (and please do check the trigger warnings)

Cons:
- I think there were a few points that information was repeated almost verbatim and that was a teeny tiny bit annoying, but also most people probably didn’t read this in all of 2 days like I did.
- I’m gonna reiterate that this is dark because if you’re not in the place for it, it could be REALLY bad

Overall:
I’ve not given a dark academia book more than a 3 star before but this gave me all that elitism, all that “the rich get away with it”, the “if you have what they want you can get in but never be one of them” vibe that is quintessential to dark academia, but in a way that engaged with the themes and how otherwise good people could fall foul of them, not just making everyone into cartoonishly evil people, because that’s not how the world works! This was dark and gritty and punch you in the teeth with violence and gore and horror, but kept from despair by genuine human connection and that sometimes, even on the worst days, eating junk food with a friend is enough to keep you hanging on.

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seakingnur's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes

4.0

It's a very intriguing world. I think the ending makes sense. Everything in the story builds into that and all the loose ends are tied. It's a well written story.

I feel like you can figure out who the culprit likely is. You read this book more for all the moments in-between. All the close calls Alex has to go through in order to find the evidence she needs. The ways she interacts with Darlington, Dawes, her roommates, the people from her past. The story is driven very much by the main character. You want to know more about her, what she's gone through, how she's going to react to everything that's being thrown at her.

It's a well-built complex magical system that's woven into our own world. I think I prefer stories like that rather than having a magical world completely separate from our own.

This can be a very heavy book. I recommend it but also be cautious while reading it.

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